Badiou

We may summarize the main points of the programme that inspired postwar French philosophy as follows.

1. To have done with the separation of concept and existence—no longer to oppose the two;to demonstrate that the concept is a living thing, a creation, a process, an event, and, as such, not divorced from existence;

2. To inscribe philosophy within modernity, which also means taking it out of the academy and putting it into circulation in daily life. Sexual modernity, artistic modernity, social modernity: philosophy has to engage with all of this;

3. To abandon the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and to demonstrate that knowledge itself, even scientific knowledge, is actually a practice;

4. To situate philosophy directly within the political arena, without making the detour via political philosophy; to invent what I would call the ‘philosophical militant’, to make philosophy into a militant practice in its presence, in its way of being: not simply a reflection upon politics, but a real political intervention;

5. To reprise the question of the subject, abandoning the reflexive model, and thus to engage with psychoanalysis—to rival and, if possible, to better it;

6. To create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer

via

Here be Monsters.

Monsters are highly polysemic — you can use them to “mean” almost anything. And the same monster can have four or five contradictory meanings in the same film or book.

Should we not include this polysemy in our very definition of Monster? That is, part of what’s monstrous about monsters is somehow this very agglutination of significance, these uncontrolled outgrowths of meaning. There is a passage in Zizek about Spielberg’s Jaws where how remarks on how the notable plurality of the meanings given to the shark is the key to its meaning. The shark’s monstrousness is produced retroactively by the fact that none of the proffered meaning stick to it. The failure of each successive meaning to enclose it seems to delineate, by negation, the magnitude of the monster. (In Othello, Iago’s evasive answers indicate some ‘monster in [his] thoughts’ which are producing the evasions. The evasions are the ripples formed by the hidden monster.)


Monstrousness is the name we give to what both generates yet refuses our interpretations. The very plurality of interpretations appears to have been generated by the monster itself. (And speaking of ‘generation’ isn’t there a persistent link between monstrosity and birth/ procreation? ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters..’ the suggestion is of blind propagation.)

Caliban as monster. He is ‘servant-monster’ ‘man-monster’ and ‘fish-monster’ all within the space of 50 lines. Polymorphous, then, as well as polysemic. But isn’t what makes Caliban a definitive monster the fact of his botched-humanity? Don’t we typically see the monstrous as a deformation or mutation of humanity rather than a thing in its own right? In MND, what do the mechanicals say on Bottom’s transformation into an ass - “oh monstrous’. An ass itself would not be monstrous, but the warping of humanity, the becoming-other, this animal enhancement…here lies the monstrous. The monstrous is a protrusion of the human beyond the human. An eyeball bulging from the socket like a boiled egg, a tongue growing out of a neck, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders – all might meet with the cry ‘oh monstrous’! ‘Nature’ has been perverted, distended, re-arranged. Some fly has entered the Natural ointment. (Indeed, one thinks of ‘The Fly’ movie, where a tiny laboratory complication, a microscopic interference, produces the utterly monstrous.)

There is also a tradition according to which a monster as portent: ie, it’s a sign, an index of a Catastrophe. It points beyond itself, it is a crack or kink in nature through which presses the Horror. The monstrous is a grimace in the surface of reality that discloses some Other Thing - not necessarily ‘under the surface’, but some Thing which at least bends the surface out of true.


R.W. Dent, researching Shakespeare’s use of ‘monstrous ingratitude’ in Lear, cites the following: 'The name of men is too good for them (i.e. those guilty of ingratitude), seeing they are monsters in nature the which hath seeded a certain sense of thankfulnesse in all creatures' (from R.Allen Oderifferous Garden of Charitie). Ingratitude is 'monstrous', because it is unnatural, it seems that nature has omitted something, and this subtraction produces monsters. Some little irregularity in nature, some minor variation in the DNA (Nature’s own Symbolic Order) allows the monstrous to appear. The monstrous, not as a thing in its own right, but a function of some slip up, bodge, omission. ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the monstrous is something against which we must be constantly vigilant – we take our foot off the peddle, we take our hand of the lid, and the monstrous emerges. The monstrous creeps into reality trough a loophole of inattention.



Why is it that deep sea fish appear monstrous? After all they are only fish. Is it not that these appear as:

1.formless, lumps of proto-matter, blind and undeveloped life.

2. they do not fit into our available grids of classification – they appear as anomalies, inexplicable lapses in nature, often from another time, surviving bizarrely into the present.

3. they appear only as the distended or abnormal form of more familiar creatures, a series of botched experiments.



Satan, who represents Evil, the utterly vicious, is yet not a monster because he also fits absolutely into a certain moral universe, a certain symbolic order. What would be monstrous would be some pathological outgrowth within that moral order.

The monstrous is always something that breaks through, distorts, or simply refuses our Symbolic ways of organising the world, our various symbolic orders – whether these be Nature, Good/ Evil, or whatever. The monstrous is the presence within these of something foreign, but a foreignness which seems to be nothing more than a mutation within the familiar.

In a certain way, the monstrous belongs to the realm of appearance. Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,

From the pre-Xian point of view, xianity can only appear monstrous. The ‘monstrous’ depends on the perceiving gaze, and which symbolic system one occupies. Perhaps the birth of the new is always destined to appear monstrous.

Notes.

Still to be explored: link between creation and the monstrous.

Q: Why mythic beasts creatures like satyrs and unicorns not 'monsters'?

[nb see comments for some v. interesting links and suggestions]

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Re-release of Debord's films - see this website. Includes clips. (thanks mc)

Abandoned MS?

Having copied it out in her own hand, she put it in a virtual casket...

Archaeologies of the Future

I'm curious to know whether anyone has looked at the new Jameson book. Your comments may influence whether I buy it. Or at least, whether wait for the paperback.


(I'm also curious, in a different way, to know whether anyone's seen this film.)

The (Sock) Puppet and the Dwarf

The following is a passage from a recent Zizek article in the LRB:

For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself the realisation of an alternative history: we have to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the past. These attempts count as ‘symptoms’, and can be retroactively redeemed through the ‘miracle’ of the revolutionary act.

The accusation against Zizek (see comments thread here) is that this citation of Santner is somewhat disingenuous. Luther Blisset links to the actual Santner piece (2003, I think) which, it turns out, cites Zizek’s own Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) as support for his argument. It would appear then that Zizek is citing as an authority/source someone who is citing as a source/authority Zizek himself. John Holbo refers to this referential circle as a ‘Munchausen’ tactic. Zizek has used Santner as a “sock puppet” another commenter states, and adds with obvious glee that this is the “killer” point against Zizek, and a suitable cue to “dismiss” him as a “clown”. Draw your own conclusions. Of course, those who are interested in Zizek are perfectly capable of recognising the lazy or ‘clownish’ elements, without seizing on these as convenient escape clauses.

But in any case, things are perhaps not quite as they seem. The offending passage, above, is basically something Zizek has cut and pasted straight from Revolution at the Gates (2002), where he is referring to an older unpublished version of Santner’s essay from 2001. We can assume that Santner’s citation of Zizek’s Desert of the Real (the offending citation) was added later. The fact that Zizek has simply pasted a 3 year old passage into his LRB essay unmodified is of course remarkable in itself. It’s lazy and frustrating, but readers of Zizek know this only too well. It’s become a signature of his journalism. Which is why, to repeat what Adam Kotsko, has been saying, those who want to engage with Zizek at his strongest are advised to look elsewhere.

ps There's a clip from the new Zizek film here.

pps Initially I thought Zizek might have been playing a little joke with the Santner citation, a la Debord in Panegyric:

Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of what has come to pass: “Exchange-value could have formed only as an agent of use-value, but its victory by force of its own arms has created the conditions for its autonomous rule. Mobilizing all human use and seizing the monopoly on satisfaction, it has ended up directing use. The process of exchange became identified with all possible use and has reduced it to its will. Exchange-value is the condottiere of use-value, which finishes by waging war for its own advantage.”

He is of course quoting from Society of the Spectacle.

marginalia

The headless Scott has responded to some questions of mine about Foucault here at LongSunday. (also posted elsewhere in a controversial new blogging experiment). Meanwhile, the same author has a curious anecdote about Spivak. I'd say it's probably the Spivak marginalia story. Read into it what you will.

Melancholy

In an old copy of the NYRB, a long, (intentionally) rambling review by Charles Rosen of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. That certain kind of melancholy corresponding to situations where ways of life have calcified/ grown old. Cites Mme du Deffand corresponding with Horace Walpole:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit: Madame the Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything, Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the blackest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgements were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, that perhaps I did not know myself.

Revolutionary Nostalgia?

An interview with Zizek in today's Guardian. Speaking of Zizek, here's something I posted as a comment elsewhere:

“‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary, the Lenin who is to be retrieved is the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which the old co-ordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to re-invent Marxism – take his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word”. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically re-enacting the “good old revolutionary times”, nor at an opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old programme to “new conditions”, but at repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism… “Lenin” stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates.. in which we live.. “

In a sense (as Zizek acknowledges) he reduces Lenin to little more than the name ‘for a certain revolutionary stance’. And it is this stance, rather than the contents and costumes of the Russian Revolution, that Zizek wants to find again. His ‘nostalgia’, he would doubtless insist, is for this stance and for the space of possibilities opened up by the revolution rather than the ensuing actuality. Needless to say, many would reject this distinction.

What particularly appeals (to Z) about Lenin is his refusal to wait for the right ‘objective historical situation’ to come along for revolutionary intervention, as though revolutionary initiative lay with ‘History’. This is an illusion (the illusion of the Big Other). Instead, Lenin demonstrates how we must fully assume this initiative ourselves, and in so doing precisely transform the very ‘objective conditions’ that others passively await.

(Zizek: “such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution")

notes

There are a couple of additions to Notes On Rhetoric, inc:

The Guardian A newspaper bought exclusively by people who wish to complain about the mentality of its readership and the venality of its columnists.

Now despite Charlotte Street being at a standstill, its hits have recently doubled thanks to this link:

Any ideas??????

Edward Said

Archive

Canned

I've recently done a number of posts at Long Sunday that form something of a series. A friend has asked that I collect them in one place for his perusal. In order of composition they are as follows, with the last in the series (for now) reproduced in full).

A Crack in the Picture

Spectacles for the Gods

A Note on the World Picture

Theatrum Mundi

Gaze (i)

Gaze (-1)

'The Can':

Just as motionless images can contain narratives, so stories also paint pictures. This is hardly news: the careful selection, accumulation and arrangement of details, interpolations, parenthetical remarks; all of which delineate a scene while dictating the point from which we see it.



Lacan’s well-known story of the sardine can, with its pointedly pointless ‘joke’ is both a story about pictures and a carefully drawn composition in itself. These two things are, I think related. What follows tries to explain this relation.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea.

The first element of the composition is this image of the young intellectual striving towards, thirsting for, the world of action and conflict. This is what young intellectuals do - an utterly recognisable, commonplace trope. Isn't this is part of the comfort of stories – they move forward under a kind of spell, a spell cast by elementary recognisable scenes that promise to unfold in more or less predictable ways. Not that the exact content is predictable, of course, but the structure is predictable, the ‘parameters’ secure, and precisely so we can surrender to the content. So once more, the young intellectual longing for the ‘remedy’ of action. We know that the ‘action’ dreamed by his sedentary life is nowhere to be found, that reality will outrun and educate him.


One day, I was on a small boat with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time Brittany was not industrialised as it is now. Seen retrospectively, from the ‘now’ shared by L. and his readers, the fishermen are ‘innocent of industrialisation.’ We are looking at a lost way of life. Suddenly the scene is suffused with nostalgia; the actions of the crew are brushed with a rustic simplicity but also marked with the pathos of transience. Like the youthful ardour of the intellectual, this way of life is doomed. We, the reader, are the ones who know that these things come to an end – this is the reader the story has made us.

There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I so loved to share.

(No L., your ‘risk’ was the frisson of eyeballing reality as opposed to a sedentary everyday life; their risk was their everyday life. The fantasy of sharing: Imaginary.)

But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young, from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class –

Petit-Jean too is marked, marked with Fate; we see him as already ‘someone who died young’. Suddenly his face and words are pregnant with a Destiny he cannot know. This type of character is well known to the storyteller’s art. His end is in his beginning.

this petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry,



‘Witness to the canning industry’ links with the earlier ref. to ‘not yet industrialised’. This sardine can is an emissary of the not-yet, an interpolation from the future. Is this why it cracks the picture? Yes and no. It is, simultaneously, the very prerequisite of the picture. How? Again, the scene painted by Lacan only appears as it does – framed and sepia-coloured by a certain nostalgia, from the point of view of industrialisation. Only from and for the industrial Now is the scene what it is. It is only imbued with sad charm, the pathos of the transient, because we view it from the other side of industrialisation, because we are marooned in the industrial present and cannot go back. And this industrial future winks at us from the sardine can. We see the place from where we are looking.

which we, in fact, were supposed to supply.

(Again with the ‘We’? Lacan is to be counted one with the pre-capitalist fisherman?)

It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me ‘You see that can? Do you see it?

Petit-Jean, too, invites Lacan into a collusive looking. ‘You see that’, he says, making Lacan’s eyes to converge on the same object, mutually focused. ‘We,’ indeed. L and P-J are equal in relation to this Third. And then:

Well it doesn’t see you!’

It is this precisely pointless punchline which ‘punctures’ the young Lacan of the scene but, at the same time, punctures the scene carefully composed for the reader by the older Lacan. We, like him, are caught out, cheated. Where we expected wisdom or pathos there is only a lame joke.

Moreover does not this remark, in cheating both Lacan and ourselves, collapse the carefully composed distance between us, in the industrialised Now and those fishermen, under the sign of Fate, wresting their living from a ‘pitiless nature’?

He found this incident highly amusing – I less so. I thought about it. Why did I find it less amusing than he? It’s an interesting question. To begin with, if what petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light at which everything that looks at me is situated – and I am not speaking metaphorically.


In Lacan’s version, his different reaction to the ‘punchline’ stems from a difference in knowledge: with his specialist knowledge he can see the place from which the line is true; he has a superior vantage point to P-J. It is this vantage point which is responsible for his not finding the line funny.

But doesn’t the very ‘puncturing’ effect of the anecdote reside with P-J occupying a position not anticipated by L., meeting Lacan’s expectation with a mockingly ‘pointless’ joke and a cackle of laughter, exploiting the naivety of the ‘young intellectual,’ making Lacan the object of a ‘punchline’ where he, lured into identification, expected to be a subject?

Indeed, is it just that L. found the joke ‘less amusing’, as if his own laughter were a dilute version of Petit-Jean’s, or is it that he himself was suddenly included in the joke? Isn’t it that L. thought that they both had the sardine can in their sights whereas L. himself was in the sights? Isn’t L.'s reaction one of discomfort that his position, and the ‘lines of sight’, have abruptly shifted? Doesn’t the point of P-J’s remark, ricochet off the sardine can and rebound into Lacan’s eyes; or is the empty unseeing gaze of the can that of L.?

In fact, Lacan seems to know all this, it is precisely his point:

The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment – as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what for them was a pitiless nature – looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in the picture. And it was because I felt this that I was not terribly amused at hearing myself addressed in this humorous ironical way.

Lacan’s picture, of the fisherman and their struggle with nature, the pre-industrial way of life that touches something vital, the pathos of this, the clouds of Fate that hang over it, its naïve charm (one thinks of Berger’s peasants) is only so from a point that the picture itself cannot admit.

Road Closed

picture from here

Ladies and Gentlemen, I've decided to have a break from Charlotte Street, for various reasons. So, it will be closed until December. I will, however, still be posting at Long Sunday. Comments at CS remain open, as do the archives

May I also just draw your attention to Mark Thwaite's revamped Ready Steady Book.

28 August: : Some new posts at Long Sunday: here, here and here.

Coda to coda

Below are just a couple of things rescued from the haloscan. Not a real post, then, and I'm not opening the comments. Any points/ questions and you can of course email me (mark_b_kaplan[at]hotmail[dot]com

Val Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.

Incidentally, claims about ‘context’ are I think misunderstood, and this has to do with the unsatisfactory nature of the word itself, which inevitably suggests something like ‘background’ or inessential frame. Thus, reminders that we should look at the context of X category can be met with impatient demands to put aside such peripheral and adventitious stuff and pass on to the thing itself. But the argument about context implies that this ‘context’ is in fact inscribed in the very concept and to such a degree that it is ‘inoperable’. To the extent that a concept opens up and reveals the world in a certain way and from a certain point of view, to the extent that there is, pre-programmed into it, a range of assumptions and implications that cannot simply be shaken off, the concept is the Special Agent of its context and its history. The reverse of this is that the concept is, simultaneously, readable as a clue to the ‘context’ that it serves and reflects. Without this 'context' it is 'bereft of the light that gives it colour'.

Haloscan

note: I was unhappy with the 'coda' post, so have deleted it**. The ensuing haloscan knockabout was, I think, much more revealing and more entertaining, and is produced below. The flavour of the anti-theory position is particularly sharp here:

Sean McCann: "the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before.

I wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff. For another, both Eagleton and his one-time American admirers seem to realize that a once perceived affinity no longer exists.

Your argument here is a clever version of Matt's endlessly reiterated point: the claim that there's no there there. This is a strange attitude for a materialist to take. There are recognizable facts of social practice in, at the least, the American academy. They are not in doubt--until, that is, Theory is criticized, when all of a sudden it's pretended that it doesn't exist. Yes, there is vagueness and even incoherence in what Theory entails, just as there quite frequently, in fact rampantly, is in individual works of Theory. (Someone like Judith Butler thinks nothing, for example, of throwing together Foucault, Lacan, Bourdieu, Derrida, Hegel, and Austin in a single work of 100 something pages. A bit of this a bit of that, all hard edges rounded off and incompatabilities resolved/ignored. See, e.g, Homi Bhaba or Lisa Lowe for a similar hodgepodge of big names. The practice is utterly commonplace. An indifference to incoherence is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of Theory.) But that fuzziness does not affect the recognizability of Theory. (There are a lot of fuzzy categories that are perfectly recognizable.) The institutions Scott has mentioned are testimony to this. There are many such. The anthologies, including the Norton are another. The prevalent curriculum of graduate and undergraduate programs is yet a third. The bookshelves of hip book stores (St. Mark's in NYC) is another. The discourse of publication and professional conferences is a fifth. (In those settings, there are names you are expected to know and work you're expected to be able to pretend a familiarity with. [...]
What people mean when they say doing Theory, as I've mentioned several times now, is predominantly poststructuralism and poststructuralist influenced work, with room made for the gentle absorption of various figures who can seem to be read in sympathetic ways--even if this depends on sheer ignorance. [...]Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes: assumptions about the non- or weak referentiality of language; about the epistemological and moral dubiousness of realism; about the pervasiveness of power operating primarily through cultural forces (and very rarely arising as a product of economic or political forces); about the terribly dangers of normalization and various informal forms of social enforcement; about the value of isolated acts of resistance to norms; about the subversiveness per se of this set of intellectual assumptions. All this means that in the American academy you can be seen to combine Gramsci, Foucault and Lacan (dubious though that combination should be) and will be called someone doing Theory, but that, if you want to, say, bring Chomsky's TG to the study of meter, no one would ever, ever consider you to be doing Theory. There you have it, a meaningful social distinction that distinguishes t from T.

There are stylistic traits that go along with this set of basic intellectual assumptions--including the kitschiness John H describes so well or the performative grandstanding mentioned by Culler. The premise to be addressing the fundamental features of social reality by practicing a high-test form of literary interpetation (on display, e.g., in CR) is another facet of the quality both Culler and Holbo and Cunningham identify.

To ignore all this requires a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism.

Mark Kaplan: ' a determined resistance to acknowledging social reality and, ironically, a kind of anti-intellectualism'.

Sorry, are these being attributed to me?? It's just that if they are my reply might be different than if they are not.

Anon: keep swinging, Sean, you've got 'em on the ropes!

Roy Genders: 'Those people are often manhandled to share similar attitudes'

Sounds like a matter for the police.

McCann: 'Sounds like a matter for the police'

Oh, for pete's sake, Roy! Objection to intellectual sloppiness = policing? How absurdly melodramatic is that?!

Mark, do I think you're anti-intellectual? No. I couldn't avoid tossing back an intimation so frequently sent my way in recent days. My mistake. That said, I think Matt, say, and Jodi and to a lesser degree CR have staked out almost explicitly anti-intellectual positions. What counts in their view of things is not your argument, but your attitude. [...]

Matt: I'll respect Sean to kindly stop using my name as associated with any sweepingly inaccurate positions as he sees fit. I'm sick to death of this whole anti-intellectual meme you've insisted on foregrounding. Nobody ever accused you of being anti-intellectual. Merely pointing out objectively that "there is a history of anti-intellectualism in America" and wondering where, if anywhere, in this history, and where on the political spectrum (in the absence of any exceptionally visible left critiques of theory or positive demonstrations of something better) _Theory's Empire_ may fall is *not* the same thing as accusing anyone--Sean, say--of being an anti-intellectual.

the premise that there is matter of intellectual affinity among Theorists to consider

Who could ever argue, honestly, against such a hopelessly vague premise? The problem is where one goes with it, the uses to which such a line is being put, the sweeping dismissals without bothering to engage with particular examples, the broad sociology, revisionist historiography, etc. etc.. But I'm just repeating things here now, and I'll stop.

I've "stake out" nothing; you just don't get it. And, quite frankly, you seem rather determined not to get it.

McCann: Sorry, Matt, was I accusing you of something? I should have said I wasn't talking about you, I was just talking about your framework. It's not what you insist you believe, it's just the frame you keep advancing. The anti-intellectual meme, btw, was first put into play by you. You can hardly be surprised if it returns to whence it came.

Agreed, though. You've staked out nothing. That's not your method. No stakes in fog.


Kaplan: I suppose it’s quite amusing. After asking whether I’m guilty of anti-intellectualism and the wilful denial of reality, I’m reassured that of course I’m not anti-intellectual! On this wilful denial, more in a moment.

So, just a couple of things:
"the obvious incoherence of the more polemical anti-Theory positions"

Ah, thank you, Mark! Finally, an acknowledgment of the point you wouldn't concede before

I’ve obviously always thought that the more polemical anti-theory positions were incoherent. Where have I been insisting on their lucidity & consistency? I take you to mean that I was refusing to concede the possibility of a non-polemical position. This is false. See, for example, my response to Scott’s initial comment to T1/t2.

wouldn't see the remark about Eagleton's pomo book as being very significant--for two reasons. It's late work and quite different, I believe, in style and sensibility from, say, the Machery or Benjamin stuff

This is a strange observation. The point was not about the book’s place in Eagleton’s corpus but whether some people seem to think that Theory and Postmodernism/ Postmodern Theory are practically synonyms. On Eagleton, incidentally, the books ‘on’ Benjamin and Macherey (I take it you are referring to Criticism and Ideology) are markedly different from each other, of course, both stylistically and in terms of the presiding influences. I’d say only the Benjamin book conforms to your definition of Theory. Eagleton has always been very critical of postmodernism, certainly well before 1997. He has remained, at some level, and by his own confession, a fairly classical Marxist. Criticism and Ideology is a failrly straightforward eg of Marxist aesthetics.

Now, let me be clear. The post above does little more than record some of my ‘cursory’ impressions and then go on to ask a number of rudimentary critical questions - how are certain definitions compatible, what is the referent of Theory, what kind of a concept is ‘Theory’ – are we talking about a philosophical turn, or the result of institutional dynamics; are we dealing with a ‘Post-modern’ phenomenon in some non-trivial sense. In other words: what exactly is the object under consideration.

When such elementary critical questions are impatiently brushed aside with a brusque ‘tsk, tsk’, and an invitation – or demand- to pass beyond them to a reality which is self-evident and obvious, then forgive me if this very gesture arouses my suspicions (and impatience). The familiarity and self-evidence you speak of is, of course, precisely the proper object of critical thought.

Critical theory as I understand it is always a reflection on the things themselves at the same time as being a meditation on the concepts and categories by which we apprehend those things. So, for example, when thinking about poststructuralism, which you also invoke, we should bear in mind that the concept is largely an Anglo-German invention, and so on.

How this elementary operation, and the broaching of elementary questions can be equated with psychosis (which is what, surely, the perverse resistence to reality is) I have no idea.

McCann: Mark, I'm afraid the primary brushing here has been done by yourself and your colleagues. It's like lugging a train up a hill to even get you guys to admit that there might be a thing called Theory and that to consider it critically might be intellectual feasible and politically legitimate. That's not psychosis [..] It's simply the invention of quibbles in the guise of critical thought.

The remark about concession refers to your "Breaking News" post. Despite your later complicated elaborations, the clear point there was that criticism of Theory is incoherent and dubious. Question decided in advance.

p.s. To remind you of the obvious, no critical questions were brushed aside impatiently at the Valve. If you'll review the discussion there, you'll see that beginning efforts at probing some of them were taken up before the conversation was waylaid by various imputations of illegitimacy or unwisdom.

Kaplan: Thanks for reacquainting me w/ 'the obvious', except I wasn't talking about the Valve I was talking about your post above. As for the Breaking News post, might I suggest - as it seems to have presented you with insuperable interpretative difficulties - you ignore it, for all our sakes.

McCann: Same objection. Since some of the issues you raise were anticipated in my posts, as well as elsewhere, it's clear that I'm not trying to brush them aside--or trying to dismiss them via reference to motivation, psychology, context, hidden or unconscious agenda, or intellectual incapacity, all tactics evident in your posts and in those of your colleagues.

The Breaking News post did not present me with insuperable interpretive difficulties. It's meaning was perfectly obvious despite extensive efforts to obfuscate it away.


Kaplan: Re the monster post, it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention. What I will happily withdraw is the suggestion that your misreading of the text may have been my fault. Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless. What you might have learned from this episode is that your ‘opponent’ is seldom likely to be so generous as to act out your low and tendentious estimation of him.

Your other assertion, that the meaning of the category ‘Theory’ is perfectly transparent or (again) ‘obvious’, that resistance to this obviousness can only be interpreted as obfuscation, becomes no less false with each iteration. The appeal to ‘obviousness’ should put any critical mind on read alert. Incidentally, none of what I have said assumes or asserts the non-existence of Theory, and so what obscure jouissance you derive from repeating this claim I have no idea

Finally, ‘my and my colleagues’ don’t exist, there is no ‘position’ corresponding to this entity. I speak only for myself and will continue to do so.


An aside: Cunningham himself concedes that Theory is a ‘huge flag of convenience’. What he means by Theory is, he says, what gets taught as Theory in departments across the country. Hmm. Strictly speaking, what gets taught as Theory is anything from the Russian Formalists to Lacan to Reception theory to Walter Benjamin. The fact that a category has institutional ‘security’ in no way makes it conceptually coherent. (For what it’s worth, Val Cunningham was - shrewdly? - pronouncing himself and English studies ‘post-theory’ back in 1989.)

A recent ‘introduction to Derrida’, inevitably ‘one in a series’, carries the following blurb: “This series demystifies the demigods of Theory.’ Other ‘demigods’ in the series include Heidegger, Jameson, Said and Stuart Hall. The organising ‘concept’ here is little more than a colophon. Something that can be marketed as Theory is more likely to sell than if it was labelled ‘historiography’ or ‘philosophy of language’. Consequently, that a thinker is annexed by ‘Theory’ has more to do with commercial strategy than conceptualisation, and one shouldn’t of course misrecognise the former as the latter.

The institutional pinfold and the publishing colophon, needless to say, need to be examined and their raison d’etre worked out. It is necessary to explain their conditions of emergence etc. But to think that these pinfolds/ colophons deliver to us a ready made concept or denote something like a coherent ‘movement’ is folly.


McCann: it’s odd that others, coming to the post with the necessary good humour and good sense, were able to grasp its meaning without authorial intervention.

Yes, e.g., Matt got the point because he was aware, as was I, of the intended mockery. The humor he saw was precisely the smugness I recognized. That was its meaning. You yourself were unable to offer any other coherent account.

Your error first appeared, you will recall, in the ill-advised ‘ad hominem’ post, which you at least retracted, or – rightly - regretted, after most of its rather hasty claims were shown to be groundless.

No retraction was made. I regretted bringing my colleagues into contact with intemperate and thuggish writers like AvW and CR, and I attempted to give you the chance to back off some of the nastier of your suggestions. I stand by every one of the assertions in that post. The Valve's effort to talk about Theory was met with innuendo, contempt, vilification, and least courageously, quibbling and pedantic mockery--all of which congratulated itself on its political bona fides.

[...]

Kaplan: If there are any readers left, other than the impressively indefatigable Sean, who would like to consult my gloss on the Monster post, please see here, here and here
I think it blindingly obvious that I am not proposing that “what would catch a Theory monster [would]be Theory itself”. Anyone having genuine difficulty should email me.

McCann: and good luck to you trying to make sense of it.

Kaplan: 'And that's good night from me',
'and it's good night from him.'

** After receiving an email request, I've now reposted the deleted post at the end of the comments.

The Para-Costives

Suppose we invent a collective name for those people not ‘doing theory’ in Literature departments. Suppose we call them the Para-Costives. Yes, it’s an arbitrary and possibly misleading name. We say: the name ‘Para-Costives’ refers to a cluster of related approaches to literature and other texts. And let us discuss the merits and demerits of Para-costive criticism. Let us say that Para-costive criticism suffers from a lack of coherence and has failed to theorise ‘it’s assumptions adequately. We point out various contradictory Para-Costive claims, the inexplicable gaps in its canon of criticism. But wait. Let those impugned or hailed by the label Para-Costive rally together in self-defence. Let them, in so doing, discover things about what their methods have in common – analogies, themes, and shared assumptions. And so let them start saying things like ‘Which way forward for the Para-Costives’, and editing new anthologies with titles like “The New Para-Costives”. And eventually, as they become older and self-reflexive, conferences will spring up on “What is Para-Costivism?” Let them break away and form their own sub-department, with its own canon and terms of reference. They compile anthologies of Para-Costive criticism. And their enemies, who have lost much ground, will compile a counter-anthology; its cover shows a man shovelling horse dung and it is entitled ‘Symbolic Ordure: Cleaning out the para-costives’

p.s. Theory, a 'house of cards'? nonsense!!

Rhetoric Class

Lenin sends me the following email:

Surely the most obvious entry for Notes on Rhetoric has been missed? Middle class! A letter writer to the New Statesman calls Richard Gott a 'middle-class lefty', Nick Cohen derides 'middle-class left-wingery' (what class does a well-paid journo fall into these days?), someone has just called me a 'middle class trot' etc etc.

So, here's an entry:

"Middle Class. Your opponent, (especially if left-wing or intellectual), exists in a materially and culturally rarefied realm, separate from the masses, whose common sense they scorn. As they are Middle Class, their views are likely to be dippy, unreasoningly and excessively liberal /radical, ill-conceived, insufferably smug, know-it-all, hoity-toity and with all the sympathies on the wrong side. They can be airily dismissed with a bit of common-wi-nowt-tekkin-owt wisdom."

Indeed. How many times must we see this stupid, dishonest gesture rehearsed?

It’s not only the vain, tedious pretence that arguments and viewpoints shared across the population are the preserve of the bourgeoisie (a bourgeoisie defined not by its position in the relations of production, but by its poncey ‘lifestyle’). It’s not the the trotting out of this feeble rhetorical trick in lieu of argument. Nor is it the dull inevitability with which these ‘critics’ of middle-class pomposity are in fact it’s most obvious and embarrassing representatives. Nor is it even the patronising and disingenuous adoption of a ‘robust working class common sense’ from which these attempts at satire are launched (Even though their audience is also middle-class, so that they rely only on some kind of collective class shame or bad faith). It’s that these self-dramatising comedians would never dream of any actual class analysis, any genuine critique of ‘bourgeois values’ or ideology. They’d run a mile before pronouncing something like this, for example:

...what makes them representative of the petit-bourgeois class, is that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter politically.

No, the invocation of ‘middle-class’ and ‘bourgeois’ as pejoratives is all dandy as long as it’s aimed at the Left. That’s the rule. And there are enough scribes who’ve read the script and appreciate the remuneration to pass these stock gestures off as their own spontaneous ideas.

A not unrelated matter. Adam Kotsko has a nice little post on 'Islamo-fascism':

Seriously, "Islamofascism?" Are the terrorists winning the sympathy of the common folk by promising to get the trains running on time? Is contemporary Islamic terrorism characterized by a militaristic aesthetic? Are there rumblings of a return to paganism? Is there an industrial-style operation currently attempting to exterminate one or more races of people? Is this supposed Islamic version of fascism an attempt to ward off the danger of communism in the face of the injustices brought about by rapid industrialization? Is it focused in on a messianic leader who speaks publicly to crowds of thousands? Are the terrorists of a nationalistic and expansionistic bent? Do they actually hold power in a legitimate nation-state at all?

The ‘meaning’ of the concept of Islamo-fascism, like so many other such concepts, is to be found outside it in the positions it allows people to take up, the roles its authorises, as in “Yep, I’m fighting fascism, just like o’ George did back in the 30’s, just like the old decent left did. And of course, reciprocally, ‘why ain;t you fighting fascism. You’d better have a damn good ex-coose’.

Similarly, the tired ‘middle-class lefty’ jibes permit self-dramatisation as a debunker of unreal flim-flam of posh people, an Imaginary little theatre piece to amuse and reassure, whilst the actual ruling class go about their business unscathed.

Interruption Continuation

I remembered that there was a chapter in Jameson's book Postmodernism entitled 'Theory'. The initial Theory in question here is that of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, as featured in Against Theory. Anyway, the definition of theory here is an interestingly restricted one, at least according to Jameson:

Theory = '"the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable". This tendency is tehn identified and localised in two kinds of privileged error: the separation of "authorial intention and the meaning of texts", and a larger, or more 'epistemological' pathology, in which 'knowledge' is separated from 'beliefs', generating teh notion that we can now somehow "stand outside our beliefs", such that "theory" now becomes "the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without".

So, that's one point, and the thought that came to mind was that, regarding any definition of T/theory, one might always productively ask: what here would count as non-theory, or the opposite of theory (is it 'practice', is it 'Reason and Evidence' (!), is it 'analytical philosophy' or what?

Second thing of interest in Jameson's chapter is what he says about New Historicism, which was at the time (1991) the 'latest thing'. Jameson thinks that if this name corresponds to anything it is less ideological or intellectual content than a 'shared writing practice'. But he goes on to say that New Historicists are, in a sense, simply those who felt interpellated or were compelled to answer the label 'New Historicism'. Here it is in Jameson-ese:

"A crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual
is always the general category to which I am also condemned by other
people and which I must therefore come to terms with (Sartre said assume) in any way I like - shame, pride, avoidance behavior - but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I am somebody special. ..A New Historicist, as Sartre might have said, is one whom other people consider a New Historicist. In our other terminology, this means, in effect, that individual immanence is here in tension with a certain transcendence, in the form of seemingly external, collective labels and identities."

Theorists are those people who, from a certain point of view, appear to be doing a single thing called Theory. This last (to parody FJ), is nothing but the name given to a kind of objective mirage, generated by distance and unfamiliarity, but then projected back onto the object itself. Those quite diverse individuals singled out by this name, nonetheless appropriate it in strategic defiance, hoping to evade the disempowerment of their interpellation by heroically becoming it.

Thought for the Day

A concept that has too many clothes may in the end be the same thing as a concept that has none.

The Deferral of Writing

'Unfortunately, the next day was not that vast, extraneous stretch of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it came to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.'